USCTs at Sugar Loaf

In early 1865, the U.S. Colored Troops (USCTs) confronted a Confederate division deeply entrenched in fortifications that spanned Federal Point, stretching from Sugar Loaf to Myrtle Grove Sound. 

Wilmington remained the Union’s objective after taking Fort Fisher on January 15, 1865. The Union wanted to use the Cape Fear River and the city’s railroads to help supply Gen. Sherman’s army as it came north to join Gen. Grant’s forces. For several weeks, Union troops waited for reinforcements, scouted Confederate defenses and made plans to defeat Fort Anderson, guarding Wilmington on the Cape Fear River’s west bank and the Confederates blocking their advance up Federal Point. 

On January 19, the 3rd Division, XXV Corps, including Ames’ brigade (4th, 6th, 30, and 39th USCT), Wright’s brigade (1st, 5th, 10th, 27th, 37th USCT), along with Abott’s brigade of white troops, tested the Sugar Loaf line, which withstood the assault. Meanwhile, the Union warships continued regular shelling day and night. 

On February 11, these Union troops attacked the Sugar Loaf line. During a “brisk skirmish,” Ames’ USCT brigade lost “2 commissioned officers and 14 men killed, and 7 commissioned officers and 69 men wounded.” Unable to overrun the Confederate defenses, the USCT brigades withdrew and dug in 800 hundred yards south, keeping the Confederates in check for the next eight days. 

During the nights of February 12th and 14th, recently arrived Federal reinforcements marched several miles up the narrow sea beach to Masonboro Sound, where the navy tried to land pontoon boats and transfer the soldiers to the mainland for a rear assault on the Sugar Loaf line. When bad weather foiled these plans, the Union transported these reinforcements across the Cape Fear River to attack Fort Anderson, which fell on February 19th. Their position now exposed to attack from the north, the Confederates abandoned the Sugar Loaf line that same day with the USCT in hot pursuit.  

Know Before You Go

Sections of the Confederate field works, constructed beginning in October 1864, using forced labor of both enslaved and free African Americans, survive remarkably intact in the  Carolina Beach State Park and at the local Joseph E. Ryder Jr. Civil War Park.